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I am a communist, very much on the left, but he's still a favourite composer of mine

32K views 193 replies 37 participants last post by  mmsbls 
#1 ·
Without wishing to open a can of worms (although, it seems inevitable that anything regarding this composer will be...:rolleyes:) I want to share an article I really like that quite accurately introduces aspects of Richard Wagner's works that I find particularly interesting:

Ride of the Red Valkyries: Wagner, Marxism and 'The Ring'

Hope you enjoy reading it!

In sharing this article I am curious to know a few things....

I am not well aware of what the public perception of Wagner is these days so I don't know exactly how much of what is mentioned in the article is part of common discourse. Amongst many other people I know who are both self-described communists and fans of classical music, there's still varying opinion regarding how much of his stuff is proto-fascist, but the majority seem to hold the view that there are far more relevant concerns to have in terms of reclaiming his work for the left, inclusivity, and such things.

Also, what do people here think of Adorno and what he has to say about Wagner? And by extension, what do people here think other philosophers of the Frankfurt School regarding music and the culture industry as a whole?

:)
 
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#4 · (Edited)
Thank you for this thread.

It's been Wagner's burden, and the burden of any of us who have more than a superficial appreciation of his works, to live in the seemingly permanent dark shadow cast over them and their composer by Hitler and Nazism. The assumption that Wagner's well-known antisemitism and Hitler's passion for his operas make those operas antisemitic prologues to the Third Reich has become a popular meme that people who know absoluetely nothing of the operas themselves are amazingly eager to perpetuate. The article you're offering - I've just read it with pleasure - seems to me accurate, insightful, and succinct, and could be a terrific introduction to a different and truer way of understanding Wagner's works from the standpoint of their political overtones and implications.

I see no intellectual obstacle to claiming Wagner for the left. The composer was never easy to categorize politically, but in his younger years, the years when his Ring cycle was being born, he could be characterized as an anarchistic democratic socialist, and at the very least an anti-authoritarian. He wished above all for the freedom of the individual to express his true nature, unconstrained by false and oppressive moral and legal codes, political systems, and traditions, and regardless of the changes in his specific political positions throughout his life, the struggle of the individual against the world's oppressive powers - social, political, or religious - remained a basic theme in his operas. The author of the article explains very succinctly, if necessarily summarily, that this is a fundamental theme of the Ring, which is ultimately as anti-fascistic as a dramatic work could be (Shaw saw it as strictly a socialist allegory, which I think is too limited a view). Most interesting to me is the author's mention of Wagner's interest in Feuerbach, whose philosophy of religion posits that the gods are the projections of human qualities and values onto the natural universe. With this in mind we can see the Gotterdammerung - the end of the gods - as the advent of a stage in human cultural evolution which we might identify with the Enlightenment, the end of mythic consciousness and man's confrontation of the existential reality of a mortal existence for which he, unaided by divine intervention and unencumbered by authoritarian codes, must take full responsibility. (It may seem contradictory that after the final cataclysm of the Ring, in which the gods are destroyed, Wagner's final work would appear to be an embrace of religion - Nietzsche had a real problem with that! - but an exploration of the paradoxical magic show of Parsifal would be way too much to go into here.)

I hope that when you see further discussions of Wagner on the forum, and discover how easily they slide into the familiar tired cliches about Hitler and Nazism, you'll cite this particular article again. It could at least provide a springboard for a more objective discussion of what Wagner's works are all about.

(When it isn't so late at night and I'm more awake, I will reread the article and consider some of its ideas more thoroughly.)
 
#13 ·
Thank you for this thread.

(When it isn't so late at night and I'm more awake, I will reread the article and consider some of its ideas more thoroughly.)
And thank you for taking the time to respond! I didn't quote your full post, but I enjoyed reading it and have come to similar conclusions regarding Wagner's political allegiances, particularly around 1848.

I look forward to delving more into this aspect of Wagner's life and works.

Mind you, I haven't yet read Adorno's In Search of Wagner, but it's on the list! And I do believe also that Shaw's reading of the Ring has it's limitations, but has positively been expanded upon by others who took a similar angle to him.
 
#5 · (Edited)
As someone from a working class background I get sick of middle-class lefties spouting their middle-class leftie views which generally have nothing to do with the people they claim to represent. Wagner enjoyed luxury, he enjoyed a fetish for silks, he enjoyed the sponsorship of a mad king and had no scruples about taking his money. He wrote operas, the attendance of which is the domain of the middle class rich. You cannot get a more elitist art entertainment than opera. Lefties who go on about claiming Wagner just delude themselves. Opera by nature is the domain of the middle classes.
 
#6 · (Edited)
:eek:

I'm thinking someone got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.

If opera is the domain of the middle classes, should a working-class boy like yourself be telling us what to think of it? (I'm in the working class, by the way - just a poor old Wagner lover, collecting my meager social security and surviving on oatmeal and beans, and no silk fetishes or any of that lefty sissy stuff! Maybe I'm a working class elitist, then?)

Try getting up on the "left" side next time.

;)
 
#162 · (Edited)
Some people seem to forget history, specifically Soviet Union history and especially the Soviet Union under Stalin. The worst atrocities by those in power against its own people were perpetrated by communists. Oh but wait the communists say, these were bad people, my communism casts those bad people aside and only keeps the good ones. Yeah, like we are going to ignore all those lessons from history and believe fairy tales of utopia where mythical humans rise to power.
 
G
#9 · (Edited)
An interesting article. Thanks.

I am not a fan of Wagner's music, or, more accurately, I have yet to hear any that would prompt me to investigate his work further. (I'm not a fan of opera more generally, so Wagner starts with a disadvantage. Nor could I bring myself to listen to Wagner Without Words, or the ghastly entitled 'bleeding chunks' - ugh.)

I am nevertheless interested in his role in the evolution of CM and in the controversy (surely not worth still lingering over?) about his beliefs. As I'm not one who made any assumptions about his politics (or any knowledge, come to that, beyond his anti-semitism), I'm not altogether surprised to read of his early revolutionary instincts and the potential for "leftist" interpretations of his works.

As someone from a working class background I get sick of middle-class lefties spouting their middle-class leftie views which generally have nothing to do with the people they claim to represent. [...]
Claiming allegiance to Communism is just as reprehensible as doing the same for Fascism. No difference whatsoever.
Neither of these comments are essential contributions to the subject of the OP. Can't we keep personal attitudes to politics out of this, please?
 
#12 · (Edited)
An interesting article. Thanks.

I am not a fan of Wagner's music, or, more accurately, I have yet to hear any that would prompt me to investigate his work further. (I'm not a fan of opera more generally, so Wagner starts with a disadvantage. Nor could I bring myself to listen to Wagner Without Words, or the ghastly entitled 'bleeding chunks' - ugh.)

I am nevertheless interested in his role in the evolution of CM and in the controversy (surely not worth still lingering over?) about his beliefs. As I'm not one who made any assumptions about his politics (or any knowledge, come to that, beyond his anti-semitism), I'm not altogether surprised to read of his early revolutionary instincts and the potential for "leftist" interpretations of his works.

Neither of these comments are essential contributions to the subject of the OP. Can't we keep personal attitudes to politics out of this, please?
And your opinions and those of the article quoted by the OP are not personal opinions I suppose? And your opinions are not personal opinions either? We are being asked for opinion. Please!
 
#48 · (Edited)
At this point I want to remind everyone to please refrain from purely political posts, and from making needless personal comments about other members and their personal political views, where this does not concern the stated thread topics.

Personal comments about other members and off-topic comments on others' political views are particularly disruptive to the thread. By all means argue with, debate and criticise their opinions on the article, Adorno and Wagner but do not make negative posts about other forum members.

Further off-topic or personal comments may be removed at the Moderators' discretion.

Here is the thread premise and its proposed topics:

composer jess said:
In sharing this article I am curious to know a few things....

I am not well aware of what the public perception of Wagner is these days so I don't know exactly how much of what is mentioned in the article is part of common discourse. Amongst many other people I know who are both self-described communists and fans of classical music, there's still varying opinion regarding how much of his stuff is proto-fascist, but the majority seem to hold the view that there are far more relevant concerns to have in terms of reclaiming his work for the left, inclusivity, and such things.

Also, what do people here think of Adorno and what he has to say about Wagner? And by extension, what do people here think other philosophers of the Frankfurt School regarding music and the culture industry as a whole?
 
#52 · (Edited)
I know this is quite long, but it's also a fascinating talk that provides an example of how left-wing thinkers have built upon Wagner's work. Say what you will about Žižek (and I am certainly not the biggest fan of his) but even for anyone who is pre-occupied with the fascist appropriation of culture in the 30s and 40s, he illustrates some interesting performance history at the start.



I do wish to bring up Žižek as well because he is not only a Wagner fan but he brings up (in various places) about how Wagner transcends the period his works were first written and performed in, but survives different eras and can be made relevant and rejuvenated for audiences of different times and political and social situations (he cites Walter Benjamin as an earlier philosopher who brought this up too, on art in general, but I can't recall which interview I remember that from).

EDIT: I do wish to have this following discussion btw... Walter Benjamin was a Frankfurt School philosopher who said interesting things about art, and I mentioned the Frankfurt School at the start of the thread, also asking about Adorno. I'm curious to learn more about the perspectives on Wagner that Adorno had, as well as what ideas from the Frankfurt School can quite meaningfully be applied to interpreting Wagner's life and works and staging his works in the 20th and 21st centuries.
 
#59 · (Edited)
This was rather interesting. I don't know Zizek, and I found his effort to speak English very difficult to listen to. I thought the talk started out promisingly but was a bit of a ramble that could have been made in half the time. I'm not sure that his summation helped, and when he went off on how great love will be under communism he lost me (I'm not a communist, a socialist, a fascist, a capitalist, or any other -ist, and this struck me as some sort of adolescent Marxist fantasy).

That said, Zizek does make a case that Wagner's works can't be identified with the sort of proto-fascism that current PC thought attributes to them. I appreciate the point that if there are any representations of supposed Jewish stereotypes in Wagner's characters (a very big IF, despite attempts to find them there), they can be found in the "good" characters as well as the bad ones, and that the villains might actually be read more easily as caricatures of Wagner himself. I enjoyed his discussion of the updating of Wagner's Tristan story by director Ponnelle, who had Tristan die alone with only a hallucination of Isolde, thus intensifying the tragic illusoriness of romantic love. It's correct to say that Wagner in successive works wrestles with the idea of love and what it should be, with each opera proffering a different solution, but I think Zizek quite fails to come to terms with the complexity and ambiguity of Parsifal, mostly in failing to see that in it Wagner takes symbolism to a level surpassing even the Ring. That final creation, of all Wagner's visionary worlds, is a dream in which things are not always what they seem to be.

What I don't get out of Zizek's talk is any clear picture of how he relates Wagner's works to communism. Since, I gather, he was addressing some sort of communist organization, his audience might have seen some political implications I did not. I don't think Wagner's works are political in any specific way, not even the most politically suggestive of them, the Ring. In fact, I'd describe the Ring's message as anti-political or, in its final outlook, post-political. Perhaps this is consistent with the Marxist doctrine of the ultimate withering away of the state once a communist paradise is achieved. But I don't believe in paradise, and neither did Wagner once he was exiled and had time to get over his early revolutionary fervor. Zizek does expain nicely the way the evolution of Wagner's thinking resulted in successive endings for Gotterdammerung; what the final ending leaves us with is no explicit moral or program, but only the emptying out of heaven and man's inheritance of an earth he must make the best of, as the orchestra sings out a hymn to Brunnhilde, who alone could end the gods' rule of law because she was able to follow love unto death. This is not something any would-be dictator, of the right or the left, could be expected to understand.
 
#60 ·
My comp teacher was also a Wagnerian scholar. He was a guest musical lecturer on the subject of the Ring Cycle and traveled to other universities and Wagner Festivals to speak. After over 40 years of studying the maestro's music he had a funny little take on all of this. He said, "I've never heard a political resolution to an augmented sixth chord. Let me know when you write one.":D
 
G
#61 ·
As a composer Wagner was a genius. His libretti, in my view, contained contain sufficiently compelling themes of loyalty and betrayal, love and hatred, honor and opportunism, to hang the music on. To find a political philosophy defined by Wagner's opera strikes me as a bit far out. I can also seek and find a political theory in "Thomas the Tank Engine" or blame Brexit on "Peppa Pig" with equal justification.
 
#62 · (Edited)
There's much truth to that. At some level most things can be viewed as political, depending on how you define your politics. But that doesn't amount to enunciating a political philosophy.

When people talk about political themes in Wagner's operas, they're almost invariably talking about the Ring. Occasionally Die Meistersinger or Parsifal gets pulled into the conversation, but since the drama of the Ring revolves so explicitly around the acquisition and wielding of power - world-power at that - and since the work was hatched at a very political time in Wagner's life, it's natural to look for political themes in it, and easy to find them. What I think can't be done is to find advocacy of any specific political philosophy or system, and I think that's all to the good. The Ring is rich in universal human themes, as you've pointed out, and one needs to know nothing of politics to appreciate and be moved by them.
 
#63 · (Edited)
Since the implementation of communism has long since been associated with repressive, often autocratic, governments/regimes rather than representing the original concept, the term ‘socialist’ would seem to be preferable. The use of the former term may be due to, shall we say, youth.
 
G
#69 · (Edited)
Since the implementation of communism has long since been associated with repressive, often autocratic, governments/regimes rather than representing the original concept, the term 'socialist' would seem to be preferable. The use of the former term may be due to, shall we say, youth.
Well quite. And many of the criticisms of "Communism" might be due to, shall we say, old age?

I'm sure that without needing to resort to critical analysis of the faults of Communism, someone here could outline any similarities there may have been between Marx's observations about the conditions of the working class, an explanation of the reasons behind the perpetuation of such conditions, and any that may have been made by Wagner on the same subject.
 
#64 ·
Marxism is a philosophy which is Utopian in nature. Later Soviet Communism diverged greatly from this, and is just as tainted as any other politic.
I think Marxism's flaw is that it did not make allowances for human greed.

In that sense Marxism has already been indirectly accommodated into the Wagnerian formulas of power and human greed.
 
#65 ·
Marxism is a philosophy which is Utopian in nature. Later Soviet Communism diverged greatly from this, and is just as tainted as any other politic.
I think Marxism's flaw is that it did not make allowances for human greed.

In that sense Marxism has already been indirectly accommodated into the Wagnerian formulas of power and human greed.
I am no expert on the Ring and I have followed through the libretto just once, but I had the impression that the gold from the Rhein river (from which the ring was fashioned) was a symbol for money and power, and whomever it touches it corrupts. If that is so, it is a much more realistic concept than marxism, which somehow believes that the burgoisie is greedy and corrupt and the proletariat is full of virtue
 
#73 · (Edited)
I largely agree with Woodduck and others here. In my view, broad-brush interpretations of the Ring illuminate very little of the substance, complexity, and subtelty of some of the most interesting issues dealt with in the course of its 15 or so hours. As astute and entertaining as George Bernard Shaw's interpretation of the work as a political commentary is, the allegorical meaning he tries to graft onto the cycle becomes less relevent as the story progresses and turns into nothing more than an intellectual commentary which bears little relation to the dynamics of the characters or our emotional response to the drama. Even from the outset it is a vast diminuation of Wagner's creation to pin such a thin Marxist allegory to its extraordinary and believable characters. Perhaps this is why productions that attempt to present the opera in these terms, such as Chéreau's, have to resort to distorting characters, elements and symbols in order to make it fit their vision.

Deryck Cooke provides an excellent critique of Shaw in his study I Saw the World End, and as he points out, to reduce Alberich to the factory-owning capitalist is to misrepresent entirely his sin against himself, a sin we all commit, and which leads us to symphathize with Alberich even in his extremes of helpless resentment. Despite Shaw's efforts to paint him as one, Alberich is no hypocrite or fake-Christian shareholder. Similarly, to see Wotan as "Godhead and Kingship" like Shaw suggests - i.e. as the leisured monarch in league with the priesthood in maintaing the church (Valhalla) on which both depend - is to ignore all the ideas about man's religious need and dependence on legal order embodied in this magnificent character.

Wagner was too good of a dramatist to be taken in by the utopian politics that Shaw and others read into the final drama. Bernard Williams put the point well in an essay:

"The problem...is not that the Ring, as it proceeds, simply avoids politics. It is rather that the hope for a politics of innocence is what it centrally rejects. If one wants transportable philosophical conclusions from The Ring - and Wagner himself insisted that one should not want any such thing - one of them will be that there is no politics of innocence, because nothing worth achieving can be achieved in innocence. Only in the depths, where nothing has been imposed on nature or wrested from it, is the trusty and true. Siegfried is as near to pure nature as any active human being can be, and he eventually achieves nothing but disaster. Wotan does achieve many things, but in deep lack of innocence. Forced back from doing (in Rheingold) to manipulating (in Walkure) to leaving Siegfried free, he chooses to accept his own end in the hope of achieving something by purely innocent means - that is to say, by leaving everything to a purely innocent agent. Gotterdammerung shows how this does not work, and, particularly through the incident of the Rhinemaiden's refusal of the ring, why it could not work. Human action is only significant if it expresses knowledge, and knowledgeable action is already distanced from pure innocence."

As Williams says, there is no "transportable conclusion" - or at least, none that can be contained in a simple formula. The Ring does not argue for a thesis: it shows us what we are, and so helps us to understand, through sympathy, what is at stake in our moral choices.
 
#89 · (Edited)
A form of psychopathology?

I think so; especially after hearing Eckhart Tolle espouse this very thing. He says that 99% of all humans are "insane" or completely removed from reality, and are acting more like automatons than humans.

From a Jungian standpoint, the "true self" is at the center of a mandala wheel which, on the periphery, contains all the usual archetypes of human persona: the villain, the hero, etc.

The insistence that there be a "correct" identification of the characters in Wagner renders it inflexible.

If we want to discuss this, we'll need to be a little humble and take the human psyche as presented by Wagner on more open-ended terms, perhaps referring back to Jung.
 
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